Nonsense with Google's AdSense?

OmnipotentEntity asks: "I usually come down hard on the side of Google, as I feel that they have a good philosophy and they follow it. However, a forum I regularly visit had a run in with the bad side of Google's AdSense program, and our AdSense account was terminated because of 'invalid click activity.' Some research by a fellow member of the boards turned up other people facing the same problems we ran into. These problems seem localized to sites hosted in Europe. I'm an American, so I have no clue about the European side of AdSense. Have any of our European webmasters ran into the same problems, or are these simply isolated incidents? Is anyone in America experiencing similar difficulties?"

Not from Europe but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The DigitalPoint forum [digitalpoint.com] has a lot of AdSense discussion. It's quite often you hear about people getting banned for "invalid clicks". Rarely (or never) do you hear of people getting back in, or, unfortunately, ever getting any good explanation for it.

My site and....

[HTL2001]

Well a site I ran to host a guild forum got it canceled just as I was reaching my first $100 and the same happened to the guy who writes this funny blog I read (just as he was reaching his first $100 as well): http://bannable-offenses.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] (post about it: http://bannable-offenses.blogspot.com/2006/04/seri ous-note.html [blogspot.com])

some hearsay...

[Malor]

I saw some discussion about this over on Metafilter. One of the comments in this thread about Pinknews being dropped from AdSense [metafilter.com] says that it may be a side effect of Google's right hand not knowing what the left one is doing.

The commenter mentioned that AdSense had been placing a lot of high-CPC ads on his site, and shortly thereafter, he was banned. He suspects that Google's marketing department decided to push some big-revenue ads out there, and then the Fraud department, running their usual heuristics, noted spikes in big-revenue clicks. So they disabled many perfectly legitimate webmasters for something that Google itself caused. You could argue that this is fraud on Google's part, since these webmasters are deprived of legitimately-earned revenue. Worse, since they're banned for life from the program, in many cases their small businesses will be destroyed. And there is no appeal and no recourse.

In fact, there is absolutely no way to talk to Google about any of this, so problems like this only get worse. I suspect it may take lawsuits to get them to change their ways.

Google's mantra needs to add: "Do as little accidental evil as possible, and fix it when we do." But I don't see that happening soon.

Account Cancellations

[Anonymous Coward]

I know of two different sites, both of which I'm good friends with the webmasters, who had their accounts recently disabled for "invalid click activity". One of my friends had a random 140 clicks one day, and they disabled his account a few days later. No, they didn't pay him the $180 that they owed, him; no, they didn't give him a better reason upon emailing them. His site (a u.s. site) was rather small, ~200 unique per day. The other site (a Canadian one), which has over 160,000 unique per day was also cancelled for invalid click activity in much the same way--no explanation; they lost somewhere around $500. You bet, I'm damn worried that someone random will come click on my site someday and get me disabled off of adsense. They're either screwing us over, someone's screwing google over by clicking on a bunch of sites, or they just simply want to get rid of all of the accounts that didn't have the mandatory address/tax information submissions. I just don't know, but I hope it doesn't happen to me.

Re:some hearsay...

[inkfox]

You could argue that this is fraud on Google's part, since these webmasters are deprived of legitimately-earned revenue. Worse, since they're banned for life from the program, in many cases their small businesses will be destroyed. And there is no appeal and no recourse.

Relying on one other business for yours is bad business sense.

Re:Not from Europe but...

[hords]

I know someone who put adsense on their site and then clicked hundreds of ads to "Find competing websites" so they could block them. They were terminated, but they pleaded their case and swore they wouldn't do it again. After about a month Google let them back in. I was surprised.

So Google Maintains a two tier system of dealing

[HighOrbit]

Quote:

One of our lesser intelligent users setup a click script thinking he was going to do us a favor (unbeknownst to us). Within a couple of hours, Google cancelled our AdSense account. We tried to appeal to them but there are no humans available to speak to. So we gave up and tried to pursue other online advertisers and lo-behold, discovered that no one would speak to us because we were apparently on some sort of blacklist hosted by Google.

Combinded with the other comments so far, here is what we can deduce:

• Borderline cases just get kicked. Other folks with less egregious suspected fraud just got kicked off of Adsense, but were able to sign up with Yahoo or some other service
• Confirmed cases of deliberate fraud get blacklisted.

Although you personally were not to blame, your case was indeed one of deliberate fraud and Google was smart enough to figure it out. In this sense, Google is acting responsibly. In borderline cases where they can not be completely sure, they play it safe. They may not trust a site and are unwilling to do business with it again themselves, but they don't publically malign it. In cases where they know for a fact that real deliberate fraud occured, it is responsible of them to warn others.